By Roger Aronoff ——Bio and Archives--July 27, 2010
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“It’s pretty simple. It says to Congress, you have to pay as you go. You can’t spend a dollar unless you cut a dollar elsewhere. This is how a responsible family or business manages a budget. And this is how a responsible government manages a budget, as well.”But on that point, I would like to know if there is a point at which O’Donnell and other liberal Democrats, and the Republicans who support it as well, would say it was time to end unemployment benefits. Two years? Five years? What’s the number? Do they not believe that unemployment benefits ultimately subsidize unemployment and result in higher unemployment rates? The amounts paid out vary dramatically from state to state, and there should be a logical thought process to determine how best to handle this so that it doesn’t work to the detriment of the overall economy. Shortly afterwards on Olbermann’s show, O’Donnell asked Ezra Klein of “Journolist” infamy, “Now what about the ‘Party of No’ and how it’s working politically. And the Republicans seem absolutely convinced, as they were, by the way, in 1994, that being the ‘Party of No,’ and just stopping things, was good enough to win the congressional elections and they were right in ’94. Can that work again?” Now surely O’Donnell must know that in 1994, Republicans didn’t run as a “Party of No.” In fact they ran on the “Contract with America,” something that was so successful, many people wonder why they haven’t tried it again. Obviously he didn’t agree with those priorities the Republicans pledged to vote on if they became the majority party, but it was far from a platform of “No.” As O’Donnell is about to go up on MSNBC’s version of Mount Rushmore, we hope that he will try to bring a little balance to the evening line-up. And we want to congratulate the MSNBC family for finally adding a person of color to their line-up of hosted shows, as reflected on their Mt. Rushmore image. Tamron Hall is an outstanding journalist.
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Roger Aronoff is a member of Citizens Commission on National Security. Roger is the writer/director of Confronting Iraq: Conflict and Hope